to modulate a high-frequency carrier upon which the rear channels were encoded - as used by the Compatible Discrete 4 (CD-4 or Quadradisc) system created by JVC and RCA or by the more subtle technique of,.It was solved in various ways: the two main approaches being: The challenge of encoding four channels of information on the medium of the LP record, which had only just been adapted to carry two stereo channels was not an inconsequential problem in 1970. Decoding these recordings allows us to revisit old friends Many beautiful and important recordings were made in Quadraphonic, and versions of many classic recordings were mixed in Quad'. Moreover many and important recordings were made in Quadraphonic. And, as home-cinema proved thirty years later, the public do indeed have an appetite for 'surround sound'.

And a damning failure too to the extent that 'Quadraphonic' has now become a byword of nineteen-seventies excess and technical sleaze.Īnd yet, beneath the marketing veneer and the squalid business dealings, Quadraphonic sound was based on some genuine psychophysics and some very clever technology. The result of course, was failure for all the systems. A situation that clearly wasn't viable and resulted in a plethora of rival, and largely incompatible systems being developed rather than pay a competitor's licence fees. In effect, the rapacious labels tried to licence the technology to each other. The story of the failure of Quadraphonics in an almost parallel Orwellian tale of avarice and excess as a lazy and greedy music-industry squandered this unprecedented era of good fortune to prove the same was not true with loudspeakers: two it seemed were good, and four were bad! George Orwell's Animal Farm taught us that two legs were bad, and four legs were good. In place of stereo's flat 'wall of sound', Quadraphonic sound promised an immersive experience of music from all around the listener. Doug Steenhuisenīorn in the nineteen-seventies, in a world before the VCR and computer games, and in a world where LP record sales represented the largest proportion of consumer leisure-spending, Quadraphonics promised to provide a music-hungry public with music from vinyl records over four loudspeakers instead of stereo's two. It's also superior to my Adobe Audition decoding scripts.

Its SQ and QS decoding is superb, far superior to the Tate 101A and Sansui Vario-Matrix boxes, respectively. I've been able to play with Stereo Lab for the better part of the weekend. Stereo Lab - Quadraphonics and Ambisonics Quadraphonics

Sidplay audio decoder